


No One is Lonely in My Home

by Midnight_Run



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midnight_Run/pseuds/Midnight_Run
Summary: In which Alucard attempts to make a home of the ruins of what was.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Trevor Belmont & Sypha Belnades
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	No One is Lonely in My Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/gifts).



“No one of was ever lonely in my home.”

It seemed ages ago now that he’d heard Belmont boasting such to Sypha during the hours before their final battle together. And for all that he hadn’t been unable to fathom there being such a warm and welcoming place, he’d had an equally difficult time accepting the idea that that self-serving lout would willing to lie for the benefit of someone other than himself.

He’d thought it unlikely at the time, a near impossibility based on his own memories of childhood in which loneliness was an inevitability relieved by the laughing, delighted embrace of his mother and the occasional, somewhat grimmer, vision of his fond but rarely present father, but never vanquished, not entirely. He had been the child of two worlds and he had spent his short life living in the cracks between, staring out at the world from the rapports and mirrors of this castle wondering what it was like out there.

If he were honest with himself, he was still very much that that child still. There were so many things he did not understand about this world. She has been right about that much. He knew little of people beyond what he’d been told and learned from books and he didn’t know much more about vampires. He did not understand their appetites, nor did he understand why they did what they did or how they had become so cruel.

He thought that, perhaps, he’d come to understand humans, his mother’s people, at least a bit better in the short time he’d traveled with those two. Understood, if only a little, why his mother had found it within herself to beg for his father to forgive them. They were... quite brilliant, really. Or at least she was. He still wasn’t perfectly decided on the issue of the Belmont.

He drank too much, ate too much, started trouble for no obvious reason, couldn’t seem to find his way without someone to give him a push, but he was still... well. 

Certainly he could admit that Trevor Belmont was a man of great skill who had done his family’s legacy proud. He had also given him, a creature he had ever right to hate, a unique and singular gift... a place to call home and the encouragement to make a life there. Which, he supposed, was a push he himself had desperately needed. 

He still wasn’t entirely convinced that these things made Belmont worthwhile or that making this place his home rather than his tomb was the right call, but he could at least admit that Belmont was a man of greater depth than he had initially credited him for. 

Of course, in his defense, he had rather desperately wanted a reason to dislike him.

To dislike both of them, really.

But Sypha... well. Liking her had been inevitable the moment she’d threatened to light him on fire if he harmed the Belmont.

It would be a far more difficult task to not like someone like that.

It had been difficult not to like Belmont too, in the end, but he was quite certain he’d managed to mask his feelings reasonably well.

He didn’t pretend to understand their easy banter, her willingness to overlook his perfectly obvious faults or what it was that allowed the Belmont to do such commendable things whilst still acting every inch a buffon, but he had come to enjoy them and the time he spent with them.

And now they were gone.

As it should be, he’d decided, after all this was not a place for the living. These broken, haunted halls filled as they were with memories new and old. It was lonely, but he could hardly say he was alone, not in the first days when his Father’s presence still lingered on every stair and not later when memories of childhood dogged his steps.

When it became too much, he took to the grounds towalk the land, exploring the forest that surrounds what remains of both their childhood homes.

Most often he finds himself returning again and again to the tree, Belmont’s tree. Standing beneath it and remembering his soft, sentimental words as their wagon had rattled down the overgrown forest path towards the old Belmont estate. He could imagine him there as he might have been as a child: wild and unkempt, gangly limbs and bruised skin, making whips from supple branches, swishing them back and forth to vanquish invisible foes.

He doesn’t miss them exactly, but sometimes the quiet of the castle is... a bit more than he can easily bear and he can almost hear Belmont poking fun at him for the way he’s looming within those silent halls.

“Haven’t made anything of it yet? What are you waiting for?”

“What indeed?” He murmured to the dusty room.

He could almost hear his exaggerated sigh, see the shake of his head, “I didn’t give it to you so you could have more space to mope.”

“Yes, well, I suspect you only gave it to me because you didn’t know what else to do with it.”

“You always think the worst of him,” Sypha commented, a knowing smile in her voice. “But I think perhaps it is only because you don’t quite know how to let people care for you.”

There was no sense arguing the point, least of all because he could never truly win an argument with oneself. “Can you blame me? The people who have cared for me the most have both died in rather spectacular fashion. It’s not as if I have much practice at it.”

“Is that why you just sent us on our way?” She inquired, inquisitive but utterly lacking in judgement.

“I hardly sent you away.”

“Didn’t exactly offer to let us stay though, did you? Might as well have packed the wagon yourself,” Belmont chimed in. “Of course, that would have meant actually doing something rather than just letting it happen, eh?”

He did not bother to dignify that imagined comment with a response.

He spends nearly a fortnight clearing out the castle, removing the bodies, scrubbing blood and viscera from the floors and walls, dismantling the forges, and checking all the books and crannies and clearing out what unholy creatures remain.

It’s during this task that he first hears the distant sound of nails scratching at wood and finds an undead puppy with a fierce glowing blue eye in rooms which his research leads him to believe must have belonged to the Forgemaster who was noted as having a special affinity for such creatures.

When he was a boy his father would often tell him stories of his travels, of the places he’d been and the people he met, he remembered Hector from those tales.

“And you... you must be Cezar,” he murmured offering the pup his fingers to sniff at though he was uncertain whether it could still smell or whether the act of sniffing was merely one founded in instinct.

Giving a soft bark and the pup wiggled beneath his fingers and he obliging scratched the matted fur behind its ears.

“What happened to your master, Cezar?”

Unsurprisingly, Cezar had no answers to offer, but he did prove decent dinner company as he took his dinner in the great room while he burned the last of his father’s letters to his mother. It felt... right somehow to allow their lives and what happiness they had found together to remain private, theirs alone.

That night, he slept in one of the guest rooms with Cezar curled up beside him, warm with the unholy fires that animated him.

With Cezar at his side, the halls seemed a bit less haunted than they had before and, during those moments where he found himself conversing with memories of those who were not there, it was comforting to have Cezar to glance at as he spoke he felt a bit less like he was losing his mind.

“I couldn’t have very well asked them to stay, could I?” He commented to Cezar who had curled up on the remains of one of the fallen staircases that littered the Belmont hold. He reached down and hauled the shattered remains of a bookcase upright to get at the weathered books beneath. “To keep her from herpeople.”

“Oh yes,” Trevor’s voice drawled as surely as if he’d been peering in to inspect his work without making any offer to help as Alucard piled books carefully against one arm, “because Sypha’s family couldn’t possibly have visited her here. They just hate to travel.”

“Shut it,” he murmured, escorting the precarious pile of books across the room to join their fellows against the bookcases in the Eastern corner of the hold under Cesar’s watchful eyes.

“Well, that’s rude, isn’t it?” Sypha scoffed, her shoe scrapping over the still quite dusty, wood strewn tiles.

For a long moment he thought he was merely imagining them as he had been imagining their voices for months, but he could hear their hearts beating, smell the very human and oddly welcome stink of their skin.

“Ancestors are probably spinning in their graves the way you talk,” Trevor added, boots crunching over the remains of a glass... something. He let out a low whistle that immediately made him realize he’d somehow managed to completely forgot how deeply the Belmont could annoy him just by existing. “You know, I think this place looks even worse than it did when we left.”

“Oh hush,” Sypha scoffed sliding forward to slip the top book from Alucard’s pile and flip it open. “The castle looks much better.”

“Thank you,” he replied, staring after her in wonder. “What are you doing back here?”

“Oh, that, well, Sypha thought we should come pick you up,” Belmont replied a bit too quickly as he crouched down to scratch Cesar’s ears.

Sypha glanced up from her book to roll her eyes, “He says as if he hadn’t mentioned you before we’d even made it to the first town. I think he was worried you might get lonely.”

“I was not!”

“Yes, you were. You were concerned.”

“About the vault.”

“And fuck you too,” Alucard replied, cheerfully, setting his burden onto the pile with the rest. “But since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful and help carry these books.”

“Fine,” Belmont commented with an exaggerated sigh, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he turned to snatch a half-dozen books from the pile Alucard had unearthed early that morning.

“I’m glad that’s settled. Who wants to have dinner? I am starving,” Sypha commented, already halfway back to the castle without ever glancing up from her book. “We’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of us if we want to be back on the road come Spring.”

“What’s that?” Alucard called after her, but she’s already gone, her steps fading into the distance as Belmont clapped a hand down on his shoulder.

“That is the sound of a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer. Might as well start packing, Alucard, we didn’t come all this way just to see your pretty face.”

“Oh? You think my face is pretty?”

“Shut it.”


End file.
